Al Gore's millions are not helping the warming cause

You have to admit that since retiring from public office 13 years ago, Al Gore has done pretty well for himself.

He’s won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his efforts to publicize the catastrophric effects of global warming. He’s enriched himself to the tune of several hundred million dollars by cleverly investing in government-subsidized green energy businesses and he became a cable television network owner to boot.

He and his partners recently sold their network, Current TV, and made a tidy profit. Mr. Gore’s share? A reported $100 million. Despite his best efforts to get the deal done before the new year to avoid the tax increases foisted on rich people like himself by his fellow Democrats, he failed. Too bad. But then, it only cost him a few extra million dollars. He won’t starve. And he’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that he did his part to help the U.S. government continue to fund programs so vital that not a single spending cut could be found to help reduce the deficit.

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When conservative talk show host Glenn Beck expressed interest in the bidding for the network, Gore and company stiff-armed him. The reason? Gore found Beck’s conservative ideals to be a little too extreme. Instead, he found another buyer; the royal family of Qatar, owner of Al Jazeera -- and one of the world’s largest oil fortunes.

Irony abounds. But we don’t blame Mr. Gore for taking the oil money and running. Besides, we long ago gave up on him being an effective spokesman for the sort of political change necessary to combat the climate scourge he was so brilliant in publicizing.

It wasn’t just that he lived large, in a mansion with a carbon foot-print the size of Godzilla’s, and got around inefficiently (energy-wise) in carbon-ridiculous private jets. It wasn’t just the hypocrisies. It was the inaccuracies. His Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was rife with them, as revealed by investigations of the BBC and others. His predictions of a planet getting hotter and hotter to the point of famine and Florida disappearing under rising seas have failed to be realized.

Since 1998, global warming has stalled. Global temperatures have remained flat. But that doesn’t stop Mr. Gore and company from pointing to temperature rises in specific places -- like the U.S. for instance.

It has been well reported that 2012 is the hottest year ever recorded in the lower 48 states of America. What isn’t as well reported is that there have been wide variations in U.S. temperatures over the last 15 years. It gets warmer. It gets cooler.

Besides, the U.S. isn’t the planet. Its land mass makes up less than 2 percent of the Earth. Overall, the world’s temperature has remained basically flat for the past two decades.

Now, none of this is to say that anthropomorphic global warming isn’t a potentially serious problem. But by exaggerating the immediate threat and by making unsubstantiated -- and at times just plain false -- claims, global warmists have hurt their own case.

While Gore has made tens of millions of dollars for himself, hardly any political progress has been made for the cause he championed, in large part because his policy prescriptions would financially beggar an already financially strapped nation.

There is a decent argument to be made for reasonable carbon taxes that could be offset by pro-growth business tax cuts. But Mr. Gore has failed to be reasonable.

Finally, seeing him make another financial killing by selling his moribund TV network to a bunch of oil sheiks should disqualify him from being taken seriously by anyone on this issue anymore.